aliyadonison 's review for:

My Friends by Fredrik Backman
4.0
This was another case of my knowing-better-and-yet-ignoring-what-I-know, so I only have myself to blame for having read this. I read Anxious People a few years ago and knew immediately upon finishing it that Backman just isn’t for me, and yet somehow I managed to buy this one. Oops. 

I don’t have any glaring issues with Backman, but I simply find his writing too generic. It doesn’t feel like anything special to me, unfortunately. I can’t put my finger on what it is specifically that makes me feel like this, so maybe I’m just the problem, but his novels just don’t feel like anything new to me; you could tell me that I’d read them before and I’d have half a mind to agree. 

On paper, I really liked this. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: I love stories about friends and their lives and relationships and love and death and all that good stuff!! Now that I think about it, maybe it’s just that I’ve read so many books like this one that it didn’t manage to stand out, but I will say that there are many other books with this premise that have stood out to me. I think maybe Backman is a little bit too predictably unpredictable in a sort of cliche way for me? Like, for example,
Louisa finding another teen artist?
I HATED that. It was unnecessary and overbearing and too obvious for my taste. I also found that many of the little twists felt very, very cliche. I like a twist and I like a red herring, but I don’t see the point in something like
Joar still being alive.
Maybe it makes more sense to keep readers waiting for that revelation, but why would
Ted not have mentioned that to Louisa? I suppose maybe that would’ve led to an unfortunate conversation about Ali, but c’mon — Louisa, like readers, spent a majority of the book believing 2/2 were dead and I don’t really see why Ted would’ve kept her in the dark like that.
Maybe I’m just stupid, but stupid people are still allowed to have opinions. In somewhat the same vein, as much as I was happy about it,
Joar’s old man’s accident felt predictable.
Does everything have to be a surprise? No! But it felt like that was supposed to be a shocker, and it wasn’t and it felt like it was trying to shock me rather than actually do anything. Of course that’s how it ends. How could it end any other way? I’ve only read one other Backman, obviously, but that felt like a very obvious Backman move.

As mentioned before, I did like the themes of this book, though I did find them slightly overexplained at times. There were still a handful of quotes that spoke to me, including
“In life we might be enemies, but when faced with death, we see the truth: we are one species, all we have is each other, and where you go, I shall follow.”
which I think lays out many of the big themes of this book perhaps a bit too heavily but it’s still so real,
“He carried on painting those skulls, because then it felt like Christian was still alive in his fingertips. Perhaps it's like that for you too. Art is what we leave of ourselves in other people.”
, and
“It might sound like an unhappy ending, but only if you forget how many times during this story we've told you that someone laughed.
How many really good nows is that? How many people ever have more?” 
. 

The TLDR is I’m lowkey just a hater of Fredrik Backman, and next time, I will reread this review to remind myself why I don’t need another one of his books. They aren’t bad, but they’re just not super memorable for me, and as much as I want to love and root for his characters and their stories, I feel for them in a very disconnected way that is so different from the way I feel for characters I truly care for. 
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